1 July 2022 – 14 September 2022
To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.
Olivia Laing, Everybody: A book about freedom, 2021
The human body occupies an ambiguous, often contradictory role in cultural categorisations, from the cosmologies of archaic societies to the concepts and practices within contemporary Western civilisation. It is seemingly the most obvious and familiar visible ‘thing’ perceived, and yet tends to fade away through the act of its own perception or its relation to the outside world.
Our bodies matter, but right now they take on an extra layer of relevance. As conversations around global physical and mental health as well as systemic racism swirl in a political context, The body we are in encourages you to celebrate your unique body and the experiences it holds. The exhibition invites you to feel connected to other bodies through time and across space, allowing time to reflect on how we can care for and offer community to one another, through viewing and experiencing the artwork selected for this exhibition it touches on the inner and the outer, the seen and the unseen, sometimes contained and yet more often found exuding from within, as well as outside of our own bodies.
Wider themes of intimacy and detachment, displacement and desperation, responsibility and exploitation are presented through eight artists’ considerations around what it means to have, as well as be part of a larger network of complex, bodily relations.
Hayley Lock, July 2022
Annabel Dover
Through a variety of media including painting, photography, video, cyanotype, and drawing, Annabel Dover engages the viewer in untold tales of wonder. Throughout her practice she finds herself drawn to objects and the invisible stories that surround them; and explores their power to allow socially acceptable emotional expression. The work presents itself as a complex mixture of scientific observation and tender girlish enthusiasm. Her work is part distillation, part peripatetic ramble through her influences which range from archaeological illustration, archaic scientific techniques and the enthusiasms of a Victorian lady, to the theories of Freud and anthropological research. Her PhD at Chelsea College of Art explored a practice-led response to the cyanotype albums of Anna Atkins and forms the basis for her novel Florilegia.
Laila Tara H
Laila Tara H’s Iranian heritage and years spent moving through continents have inspired the language through which she articulates her own history of living in different cultural settings. Utilising these historical techniques, her works explore and experiment in scale and negative space. Detailed figures suspended amidst contemporary urban scenes, disjointed limbs amidst delicate foliage, are all arranged in stark, startling compositions that defy stylistic cannons and stretch boundaries. She often cuts and folds paper, puncturing and destabilising space to introduce new three-dimensional depth and shadow play.
Her works, most often painted on hand-made natural hemp paper sourced from Sanganer, India, explore a range of emotions, and create a charged surface where the tension between form and formlessness; the object and its surrounding emptiness, plays out. The figures explore our sense of perspective and time and are interlaced with deeply personal narratives. Laila mostly uses pigments that are either naturally derived or prepared using traditional methods from found materials—these range from crushed red London bricks; walnut ink; madder red pigment; deep blue lapis lazuli from Badakhshan province of Afghanistan and India, sourced from Florence; ochres from Iran, collected from the island of Hormoz.
Lisa-Marie Harris
Lisa – Marie Harris works-on-canvas presented for The body we are in are flesh memories, belonging to an ongoing series of investigations into the dehumanised parts of a whole and originating from an interoceptive action of looking down at oneself, into the niggling sense of detachment which hides within labouring bodies, her own included.
Each piece – its tactility alluring and yet unsettling – is a keloid of scar tissue dissected from a body broken down by reproductive work, and isolated in the reducibility of that task. Distilled and redacted, the artist presents two new pieces for the exhibition. Materially engaging and distinct, the sense of the whole and the part of a body inhabits a neutral space, asking questions of the attachment and detachment of a body both experienced in closeness and from afar.
David Lock
In the process of creating his ‘Misfit’ paintings, David Lock makes collages culled from advertisements and imagery from magazines and the internet. In their making, the collages and subsequent paintings have a performative quality. In this regard, he is seeking to undermine the original source material, disrupting its meaning to create a new experimental man, akin to Frankenstein’s monster.
David is currently investigating how to create a multitude of subject positions, upon which signifiers are free to float, shifting identification from one fragment to another. In this way, his paintings resist a single reading or viewpoint, and instead any reading is unmoored, fluid and contingent. A sense of vulnerability is reinforced by the paintings being composed from collaged elements. His motivations for the use of the male subject exposes an underlying uncertainty about the male’s status in contemporary culture and the role he should fulfil within it.
Sam Lucas
Sam Lucas creates contemporary ambiguous, figurative forms; conversation pieces with dark humorous undertones exploring the weight and awkwardness of being in the body. Describing how displacement is not only geographical, but can be within one’s own skin, she takes some inspiration from her own lived experience as well as the observations of others. In exploring these notions, she also, at the same time, celebrates humour, beauty of diversity and issues of self-other-environment.
Sam explores different materials and textiles alongside clay, in the hope of forming a tension and dialogue with the viewer. In her fascination for the abstracted female figure in different psychological states, her work speaks to the narrative tradition of black and red figure pottery, the most prized examples of ancient Greek ceramics. Because of its abstraction, a plurality of narratives can be explored, and reductive or trite commentary is avoided. Sam trades in mysterious Ms-stories; uncanny open-ended narratives that shape the world from a female perspective.
Justine Moss
Justine is currently using drawing to research moments in film where garments are being discarded, not in seduction scenes, by female characters. Her work combines close observation with an exploration of the material possibilities for drawing. For The body we are in, Justine uses pure gold behind glass, with drawings that evoke the intimacy of watching film on a small screen. Depicting garments in motion as they lead the gaze away from the female body, the work instead reflects you, the embodied viewer.
Emily Speed
Emily Speed is known for her work examining the relationship between the body and architecture, Emily’s practice considers how a person is shaped by the buildings they have occupied and the power dynamics at play within built space. Working in sculpture, drawing, performance and film, Emily regularly collaborates with choreographers, performers and designers.
For The body we are in Emily presents a hybrid of drawings and scene notes with sketches of the composition, notes on the shot and a small photograph of the actual shot for the Rooms Designed for a Woman film that was commissioned by Sarah Coulson as part of [Re]construct, an exhibition in the chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. These framed works reveal the more intimate side of the inner workings and thoughts for this body of work. The work itself explores some ideas around who gets to make decisions around what gets built, who designs that space, and who spends most time in those spaces.
Julie Verhoeven
Julie Verhoeven’s eclectic output is extensive across both art and design, and most recently is best expressed and encompassed through the medium of moving image and video. She favours visuals and movement over dialogue as a direct means of communication and self-expression. Her formal training was in fashion design, and she is primarily known for her work as a fashion illustrator in the noughties. She has collaborated with various designers and beauty brands, including Marc Jacobs, Chloe, Versace, Louis Vuitton, M.A.C amongst others, producing a broad range of content, including video, animation, installations, illustrations, and performance.
For The body we are in Julie is presenting LIPS, a video commission for fashion publication, SelfService magazine, No. 54. LIPS adopts the guise of a gnarling lipstick promotion. Desperate and persistent in its need to be seen, goading, chewing and licking the ‘customer’ into submission.